Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

All Aboard!

Here is some home movie footage, of a family outing on the B & O in 1947. There are manyfine panoramas of the Pennsylvania mountains, complete with wide angle shots of the locomotive, and of oncoming trains:

The two following links from different operations in Michigan will probably annoy global warming fans no doubt about that, but the outtakes are all beautiful to see, especially as they are filmed in the early Spring, and…can YOU make out Al Gore and Bill Clinton waving from the passenger car and grinning at everybody like a pair of Trained Professionals? Those boys know the secret:

“Don’t be a dub…if you can just get some credentials of your own, why, YOU can get to go and ride first class too!”?

Again, at the sidebars there are many more links to additional footage. In 1947, Dick Cheney was just a busy little shaver in Wyoming, six years old and bashing his little brother for stitches in the head with his toy Lionel locomotive, and poor Don Rumsfeld, fifteen, was in utter misery because there still was no Playboy magazine. Out of such early events in the last days of the first steam age is our pretty dull and underachieving, postmodern, baby boom history made!